March 12, 2008

Birth of...Clinton's 3am Ad: Not "Casual Racism"

ON first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.”
advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not
quite right — something that went beyond my disappointment that she had
decided to go negative. Repeated watching of the ad on YouTube
increased my unease. I realized that I had only too often in my study
of America’s racial history seen images much like these, and the
sentiments to which they allude.

I am not referring to the fact
that the ad is unoriginal; as several others have noted, it mimics a
similar ad made for Walter Mondale in his 1984 campaign for the
Democratic nomination. What bothers me is the difference between this
and the Mondale ad. The Mondale ad directly and unequivocally played on
the issue of experience. The danger was that the red telephone might be
answered by someone who was “unsure, unsteady, untested.” Why do I
believe this? Because the phone and Mr. Mondale are the only images in
the ad. Fair game in the normal politics of fear.

Not so this
Clinton ad. To be sure, it states that something is “happening in the
world” — although it never says what this is — and that Mrs. Clinton is
better able to handle such danger because of her experience with
foreign leaders. But every ad-maker, like every social linguist, knows
that words are often the least important aspect of a message and are
easily muted by powerful images.

I have spent my life studying
the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the
Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in
the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my
mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W.
Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped
revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its
portrayal of black men lurking in the
bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I
see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man,
someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

The
ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images
of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was
external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses
is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are
not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it
is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely
Latino.

Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business
suit at 3 a.m., answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in
grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency
would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In
my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that
Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.

Did the
message get through? Well, consider this: people who voted early went
overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama; those who made up their minds during the
three days after the ad was broadcast voted heavily for Mrs. Clinton.

For
more than a century, American politicians have played on racial fears
to divide the electorate and mobilize xenophobic parties. Blacks have
been the “domestic enemy,” the eternal outsider within, who could
always inspire unity among “we whites.” Richard Nixon’s Southern
strategy was built on this premise, using coded language — “law and
order,” “silent majority” — to destroy the alliance between blacks and
white labor that had been the foundation of the Democratic Party, and
to bring about the Republican ascendancy of the past several decades.
The Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush used against Michael
Dukakis in 1988 was a crude manifestation of this strategy — as was the
racist attack used against John McCain’s daughter, who was adopted from
Bangladesh, in the South Carolina Republican primary in 2000.

It
is significant that the Clinton campaign used its telephone ad in
Texas, where a Fox poll conducted Feb. 26 to 28 showed that whites
favored Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton 47 percent to 44 percent, and not
in Ohio, where she held a comfortable 16-point lead among whites. Exit
polls on March 4 showed the ad’s effect in Texas: a 12-point swing to
56 percent of white votes toward Mrs. Clinton. It is striking, too,
that during the same weekend the ad was broadcast, Mrs. Clinton refused
to state unambiguously that Mr. Obama is a Christian and has never been
a Muslim.

It is possible that what I saw in the ad is different
from what Mrs. Clinton and her operatives saw and intended. But as I
watched it again and again I could not help but think of the sorry pass
to which we may have come — that someone could be trading on the
darkened memories of a twisted past that Mr. Obama has struggled to
transcend.

Orlando
Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of “The
Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s ‘Racial’
Crisis.”

Comments

ON first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.”
advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not
quite right — something that went beyond my disappointment that she had
decided to go negative. Repeated watching of the ad on YouTube
increased my unease. I realized that I had only too often in my study
of America’s racial history seen images much like these, and the
sentiments to which they allude.

I am not referring to the fact
that the ad is unoriginal; as several others have noted, it mimics a
similar ad made for Walter Mondale in his 1984 campaign for the
Democratic nomination. What bothers me is the difference between this
and the Mondale ad. The Mondale ad directly and unequivocally played on
the issue of experience. The danger was that the red telephone might be
answered by someone who was “unsure, unsteady, untested.” Why do I
believe this? Because the phone and Mr. Mondale are the only images in
the ad. Fair game in the normal politics of fear.

Not so this
Clinton ad. To be sure, it states that something is “happening in the
world” — although it never says what this is — and that Mrs. Clinton is
better able to handle such danger because of her experience with
foreign leaders. But every ad-maker, like every social linguist, knows
that words are often the least important aspect of a message and are
easily muted by powerful images.

I have spent my life studying
the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the
Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in
the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my
mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W.
Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped
revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its
portrayal of black men lurking in the
bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I
see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man,
someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

The
ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images
of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was
external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses
is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are
not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it
is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely
Latino.

Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business
suit at 3 a.m., answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in
grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency
would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In
my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that
Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.

Did the
message get through? Well, consider this: people who voted early went
overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama; those who made up their minds during the
three days after the ad was broadcast voted heavily for Mrs. Clinton.

For
more than a century, American politicians have played on racial fears
to divide the electorate and mobilize xenophobic parties. Blacks have
been the “domestic enemy,” the eternal outsider within, who could
always inspire unity among “we whites.” Richard Nixon’s Southern
strategy was built on this premise, using coded language — “law and
order,” “silent majority” — to destroy the alliance between blacks and
white labor that had been the foundation of the Democratic Party, and
to bring about the Republican ascendancy of the past several decades.
The Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush used against Michael
Dukakis in 1988 was a crude manifestation of this strategy — as was the
racist attack used against John McCain’s daughter, who was adopted from
Bangladesh, in the South Carolina Republican primary in 2000.

It
is significant that the Clinton campaign used its telephone ad in
Texas, where a Fox poll conducted Feb. 26 to 28 showed that whites
favored Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton 47 percent to 44 percent, and not
in Ohio, where she held a comfortable 16-point lead among whites. Exit
polls on March 4 showed the ad’s effect in Texas: a 12-point swing to
56 percent of white votes toward Mrs. Clinton. It is striking, too,
that during the same weekend the ad was broadcast, Mrs. Clinton refused
to state unambiguously that Mr. Obama is a Christian and has never been
a Muslim.

It is possible that what I saw in the ad is different
from what Mrs. Clinton and her operatives saw and intended. But as I
watched it again and again I could not help but think of the sorry pass
to which we may have come — that someone could be trading on the
darkened memories of a twisted past that Mr. Obama has struggled to
transcend.

Orlando
Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of “The
Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s ‘Racial’
Crisis.”